Eight things to love about iOS 7 [Updated]

I’ll admit it: I was leery about installing iOS 7 on my iPhone 5 and iPad 3 when it rolled out Wednesday. I’d played briefly with the beta on some developers’ phones and was not particularly impressed. I actually liked iOS 6’s natural, 3D textures and real-world visual analogies – which designers call skeuomorphism. The beta color palette and flat look of its icons seemed cartoonish to me, and the fonts and app layouts looked cribbed from Microsoft’s Windows Phone mobile OS.

But after installing and using it much of Wednesday, I’m sold. The finished version is far more polished, and in the context of the other changes as a whole, iOS 7 makes a lot more sense.

It definitely takes some getting used to. For example, I initially thought that the Swipe-to-Delete feature that let you quickly nuke email from the inbox list was gone. Not true: It turns out Apple limited the gesture to swipe-left, which reveals Trash and More buttons. Tapping More lets you Reply, Forward, Mark as Read, Move to Junk or Move to any other folder – all without actually opening the email.

There are several changes like this that aren’t necessarily intuitive. For example, it initially appears there’s no longer a List view in the Calendar. It’s there – you just have to tap the Search icon to see it.

And Spotlight, which lets you search the phone, is no longer its own page to the left of the first home screen. Instead, you swipe down on any home screen page. That’s actually better, because it means fewer accidental trips to the Spotlight page – but again, it’s not obvious.

I’ve compiled and detailed the eight things I like best so far about iOS 7 into the slideshow above. If you’ve taken the plunge, let us know in the comments what you like and don’t like about iOS 7.

Update: GigaOM points out a tipthat can prevent an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch thief from putting your device into Airplane mode, which would keep Find My iPhone from locating it.

Also, one other thing to note about iOS 7: Changes in the way graphics are displayed means you probably have some extra space on your device after install it. I gained about a gigabyte of space on my 16-GB iPad 3.

Finally, some people are reporting decreased battery life with iOS 7. I haven’t experienced that on either device, but I did notice that some apps had notifications turned on that I had previously turned off. You might check both the Notifications and Location Services settings to see if some of them have changed.

Overall, I’m not hugely impressed. Lots of good stuff from an operational point of view but much of the eye candy seems to be there “because we wanted it to look different.” The fonts/typography is too difficult to read, it’s too thin with not enough contrast in my point of view. On my phone I’ve switched to bold text, slightly larger text and high contrast in the Accessibility section. That has helped immensely. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing an update with similar changes. I wouldn’t mind seeing a stronger contrasting stroke around the letters in low contrast situations.

In short, some very good changes marred by visual change that appears to be for change’s sake. I’ll bet there’s some improvement soon.

Re: the GigaOm article and Control Center allowing bypass of Find My iPhone by putting the phone in airplane mode. That’s true – but you could just hold the power button and slide to turn the phone off. This is a “security” story that isn’t.

I did almost buy into it. I was really close to taking Control Center off the lock screen until it dawned on me.

There appears to be some bouncing around on the battery notification. My battery apparently went from 81% to 64% within 30 minutes with little use, and then jumped up to 69% with no use. I suspect there are some issues with way battery life is determined, so it may not be an issue with the battery itself.

I agree with your list, but I also agree with the post above – blocking calls is one of the best new features.

Find my iPhone relies on assumed ignorance of a thief to work. It can be disabled by turning off the iPhone or removing the SIM card. It will also stop working if the battery power runs out. A thief may not have a charger.

From any app or screen you have showing, my Pantech Discover will give you access to toggle on/off Vibrate, WiFi, GPS, NFC and Motion Recognition, Bluetooth and a few others with just a simple one finger swipe down from the top of the screen.

It has a replaceable battery, loads of features, specs similar to the best Android smart phones, internal sd slot and a 12.6 mp camera. Takes great stills but no good for action shots, can’t stop the action good enough. Havent tried to take video yet. It’s a winner when you consider I got it free with a new 2 yr contract. The top of the line competetors start at $200 and go up from there with a 2 yr contract.

Forgot to mention my Pantech home screen also provides weather info – like Henry said, all these fantastic new I-phone features have been around for quite a while on Android phones. I fail to understand the fascination for the over-priced Apple devices and yes I have an I-pad 3 and an Asus Transformer 10′ screen tablet and a 7″ Google Nexus and the I-pad gets used the least of the three.

It does make me chuckle when people are blown away by the improvements on their iPhone, when the majority of those improvements I’ve been using for a long time. But good for them, better late than never

Hey Dwight, any idea why iPhones have such HUGE radiation output? I did some math and the iPhone puts out about 300 times more radiation than my Galaxy S4 Mini. Also, many ios7 features have long been available in Android Yet another reason to skip the iPhone.

Originally you would double click the home button and it showed you everything open, and I was told to close those things to keep from running your battery down. Now when you double click you get all these windows, should you shut them down and if so how?? Thanks!

There are some technical wonders in the new OS. However I find the actual interface, the part of the OS you actually look at, to be very deficient. The font is ridiculously thin and very difficult to read for anyone with any visual problems. I took it to the UH Eye Center today and shared it with one of the staff. She (an optometrist) thinks it is going to cause problems for people with any kind of visual impairment.

This is very poor planning on Apple’s part. The technogeeks will no doubt dismiss my comments but “real” people are very likely to find this screen difficult to use. Last night I woke up in the middle of the night, and as I usually do I immediately reached for my iPhone to check the time. I could not read it and had to fumble for my glasses in the dark to tell the time. This is ridiculous.

The activation lock has serious implications for corporate users. If users, that are terminated, do no remove their apple id’s from their devices those devices will be useless. This is a major problem that needs to be addressed. It is not always easy to work with users after they have left a company. Also, there is no way to have a single Apple ID that a company can use to register the phone because Apple limits those ID’s to only 10 devices.

“Flat design”. Well that explains a lot. This theme is popping up all over the place. When I go to Kroger I cannot read many of the signs on the isles and the shelves. I’ll be glad when 3 dimensions once again rule the design world.

I get the Archive option instead of Trash when I swipe on a message too – but I don’t have Gmail on this iPhone.

I do have a gmail account and I previously added it to here but junked it long before moving to iOS 7. Do you think I could’ve forgotten some setting somewhere? When I go into Settings/Mail etc I get only my iCloud account, not a whisper of gmail.